The Duchess Who Refused to Fade

In an oil painting on oak measuring just 62.4 by 45.5 centimeters, a woman stares out with a face that seems almost impossible: a short, upturned nose, a stretched philtrum, thin pinched lips, cheeks and jaw sagging with loose, pocked skin, and a wart marking one side of her face. This is The Ugly Duchess, painted around 1513 by the Flemish artist Quinten Matsys, and it remains his most famous work — a small, strange portrait that has unsettled and fascinated viewers for five centuries.

What makes the painting so unnerving is not just the woman's exaggerated ugliness, but the contrast Matsys builds around it. She is dressed in the height of fashion — but fashion from a century earlier, the Burgundian style popular between 1400 and 1500, long out of date by 1513. Her escoffion, the aristocratic horned headdress, frames thinning hair swept behind protruding ears. A white veil decorated with roses falls from it, fastened with a gold and pearl brooch. Her corseted dress pushes her wrinkled breasts upward, well beyond what propriety of the era allowed. In her right hand she holds a red flower, then a widely understood symbol of engagement or courtship — a bud, as it has been described, that will likely never blossom.

Matsys's brushwork rewards close looking. Working wet-in-wet, he dragged and feathered his paint to soften transitions, and used sgraffito — scratching through wet paint to reveal the layer beneath — to render the hair near her ear and the embroidery on her cuff. Her uneven flesh was built from layered pink paint dotted with red and white in sporadic dashes. The brooch alone contains at least five shades of brown, orange, pink and yellow to achieve its golden hue. Infrared analysis reveals that Matsys treated her face with special care: he drew the eyes twice, shifting them slightly, then reworked the chin, neck and right ear from an earlier underdrawing, and also repositioned the right shoulder and both hands. The clothing, by contrast, was painted more loosely and freely — perhaps, scholars suggest, with help from assistants, given the inconsistent techniques used on the two horns of her headdress.

For a long time, the painting was believed to descend from a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, based on its resemblance to two caricature drawings long attributed to him. That theory has since reversed: it now appears more likely that Leonardo's caricatures were influenced by Matsys, who is known to have exchanged drawings with the Italian master.

Scholars have also pointed to a possible literary source: Erasmus's 1511 essay In Praise of Folly, which mocked older women who 'still play the coquette', who 'cannot tear themselves away from their mirrors', and who 'do not hesitate to exhibit their repulsive withered breasts'. The woman in the painting has sometimes been identified as Margaret, Countess of Tyrol, whose enemies called her ugly — but she had died 150 years before Matsys picked up his brush, making the identification almost certainly symbolic rather than literal.